Scott D. Seligman is a historian, writer, genealogist and China hand who has a great passion for telling stories of the often forgotten past of Chinese Americans, both the heroes and the villains.
In his latest book, Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown, Seligman reconstructs key moments in the vicious and bloody Tong gang wars that took place in New York and have been all but obscured by history. Through the blood-soaked stories, we get the chance to peek into the lives, struggles and desires of the Chinese who lived in the unwelcoming and exclusionary America of the early twentieth century.
Seligman has written two other books on Chinese-American history, including a biography of 19th-century Chinese-American newspaperman and activist Wong Chin Foo, the first person to use the term "Chinese American" and who urged other Chinese in America to fight for equal rights.
In this interview, Seligman talks about the important but often unfairly forgotten chapters of Chinese American history that unfolded a century ago.
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